Splendid Misery.

Otago Witness, Issue 1466, 20 December 1879, Page 21

Splendid Misery.

A NOVEL. BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S

SECRET," Ac.

f Chapter XVIII. LONELY land, a heathery plateau among the hill-tops, swept by the winds that blowover the Atlantic, steeped in salt spray, and made barren by the bitter breath of the sea ; yet not all barren, for the short grass is soft and sweet, fairy-like ferns grow in every crevice of the atony banks, and the warm purple of blossoming heath relieves the cold grey of the granite, which breaks through the soil like a flower. Far off, like couchant lions, appear the dark forms of the two Cornish tors, Bough Tor and Brown Willy. , One Bees them from every side, at every turn, as one faces westward. Looking back to the east, and to civilisation, the white walls of Dartmoor prison glimmer faintly in the far distance, on a moorland waste that looks like a valley when surveyed from this mightier land. It seems like a bit of some grand old world where giants may have lived and flourished. There is a spaciousness, an irinesß, unknown in a pastoral country hemmed in by hedgerows and dotted with the dwellings of humanity. Here you may drive for miles without passing a human habitation, Even, those open

stretches of land redeemed from barrenness to the uses of agriculture have a wild, untenanted look. One sees no labourer at work. All is silence and loneliness. No voice save the everlasting voices of Nature ; the hum of the bee among the heather ; ocean's mighty diapason dwindling to a murmur in the sunny distance ; the cry of the sea-gull ; the rapture of the lark.

Upon this Cornish moorland, within a day's walk of the great brown tors, stood the dwelling-place of the Penruths, the house in which Penruths had been born into this world, and lived and died, for the last two hundred and fifteen years. Penruths had owned the land ever since the days of King Stephen, and had worn out more than one substantial mansion in the course of their holding. The present house had been built in 1640 ; but had all the characteristics of an older date, for architectural innovations were slow to travel so far west. The mansion had been known as New Place for a hundred years or so, which name had gradually lapsed into Place, by which brief appellation Mr Penruth's house was now called, from Launcestown to Penzance, or wherever the name of Penruth was known.

The house looked as old as the Tudora. Its original splendour, which consisted in a stony solidity and grandeur of size and outline, had not been enhanced by modern improvement. The Penrutha had altered nothing ; for alterations are costly, and a turn for hoarding had been hereditary in that ancient and respectable race. The furniture was as old as the Stewarts, save for some handsome additions of carved black wood and a brace of Japanese cabinets, which an adventurous Penruth had brought home from India. The staterooms were dark and gloomy, spacious, but not lofty. The homelier living-rooms were small and stuffy. A good many of the windows were made not to open at at all, and in those which were intended to admit air a single lattice was the only opening. But to counterbalance Buch small objections as closeness and gloom, there were richly-moulded ceilings, embossed with the Penruth arms ; a noble old stair-case ; a long, narrow ball-room in the roof, wherein nobody had ever danced within the memory of man ; and a picture-gallery, where two lines of portraits, staring at each other with a perpetual atony stare, told how grim a race the Penruths had been from a period coeval with the invention of oil-painting.

The house lay far off the narrow coachroad, which went undulating across the hills to St Oolumb. There wa» a lodge by the roadside, which served as a habitation for Mr Penruth's solitary gardener j then ;came a plantation of oak and Scotch fir ; then a stretch of pasture with a car-riage-road across it — pasture which might, if one was ambitiously-minded, be called a park ; and then, separated from this grazing land by a sunk fence, came the gardens and shrubberies, which were beautiful exceedingly ; for here, screened by a belt of fir and tamarisk from the pitiless salt-sea winds, there bloomed such flowers as thrive abundantly in this western world— rose and myrtle, jasmine and magnolia, woodbine and clematis, fuchsia and hydrangea. Miss Penruth had a taste for horticulture, and prided herself in a collection of irreproachable dahlias ; but, even in this feminine hobby she was no enthusiast. She was severely matter-of-fact in her views of this lower world, but had large ideas as to the world above, where she believed that all things denied her on earth were to be awarded to her in liberal measure as the just recompense of her virtues here below. She looked at life from a spiritual standpoint, talked of herself and of her fellow-creatures as " worms," and referred continually to the hereafter where she and the chosen few who took her for their model were to have everything their own way. Yet she was not without distinctly human weaknesses. She had begun life as a beauty, in the estimation of those few families scattered wide apart within a radius of twenty miles of wild open country, who constituted her own particular world. She had been several times on the brink, or had fancied herself on the brink, of matrimony ; but her ventures in this line had not been fortunate. She had affected long engagements, and on more than one occasion had exhausted in small attentions and the monotonous meandering of a rural courtship that stock of affection which should have sufficed for married life. One lover had grown tired of his bonds, and had jilted Miss Penruth, of Place, to marry a chubby- cheeked lassie from Camelot, whose father was parish doctor. Another had taken to strong drinks, from very wearineßS of soul, and had gone altogether to the bad after Miss Penruth's weddingclothes had been bought. The weddingclothes were folded and put away in huge camphor-chests and lavender-scented drawers^ where Miss Penruth gratified herself by a leisurely survey of those garments, shaking out the silken skirts, refolding the delicate muslins, sighing over them gently as she put them away.

" Ah, I shall wear my wedding-gown by and by," she told herself.

These tender disappointments, though all to be largely compensated in a better world, had not been without their effect upon Priscilla Penruths temper. She took an equably aour view of life in general, despised the frivolity of her sex, and had strong opinions aB to the ultimate destiny of everyone— especially every woman —who was not so pious as herself. Miss Penruth was now nine-and- thirty years of age. She had dismissed the last of her lovers with a fretful sense of disap. pointment, but with no real grief; and

Bhe had made up her mind to die unmated. She had essayed various specimens of humanity, and had found them all wanting. She had tried the gold, the silver, and the leaden casket, and had discovered emptiness in all. Her lover of good old family and independent means, her rising young doctor, her penniless curate, had all been failures. Her phariaaical piety and pragmatical manners had worn them out one by one ; but she saw in their defection only the evidence of their own unworfchiness.

She had never been really desirous of changing her condition. As Miss Penruth of Place she possessed all she cared for. She had inherited fortune from her mother, and had grown to womanhood with a very definite idea of her own importance. She was fond of money, and, though she did not dislike spending it upon herself, would have objected to see it squandered by a husband or frittered away upon children. In her brother's house she spent hardly anything, save on dreßS and on certain small charities — beneficences which maintained her dignity as & Lady Bountiful at a very moderate cost. She had the satisfaction of seeing her funded capital increase year by year. On the whole she was not sorry to have escaped the rocks and quicksands of matrimony ; but the emotions and agitations of so many courtships, all ending dolorously, had left an abiding sourness in temper and disposition, with a languorous manner, as of one who considered life hardly worth living. Miss Penruth received the news of her brother's marriage with deepest indignation. That Vyvyan should marry a girl of twenty, whom he had known only for a few months, and of whose family and surroundings he gave the very briefest account, and that he should do this thing without asking her advice about it, was an unpardonable offence. , She and everybody else who knew him had decided that he was to end his days as a bachelor. His younger brother, Mark, would doubtless do the same, since he had passed his thirtieth birthday without a thought of matrimony. The estate would go to a cousin on the other Bide of the county — a man in every way worfchy to uphold the dignity of the Penruths. And in the meantime Priscilla would hold undisturbed sway at Place, and everything would go on aB it had gone on since her mother's death, just eighteen years ago. Thus it was that Miss Penruth's feelings, as she paced the broad gravel walk in front of the house on a sunny July evening, waiting for the coming of bride and bridegroom, were by no means of an enviable character.

They were coming in a post-chaise from Launceston, where the North Oornwall coach was to deposit them, and they were expected between eight and nine o'clock. The evening was lovely, and floating over hill and heather in the soft clear air Miss Fenruth heard the faint sound of distant joy-bells. They were ringing a merry peal in the old tower of Treglith Church, far away across the common. ,

" That must be Mark's officiousness," thought Priscilla. " Why joy-bells 1 My brother has married a nobody, and the less fuss there is about his marriage the better for all of us. There will be talk enough in the county." She walked slowly up and down, pausing every now and then to look across the wide stretch of pasture to the furthest curve of the white carriage road, round which the post-chaise must appear presently. She had dressed herself in her handsomest silk gown, and had decorated herself with jewellery of a substantial rather than an elegant order — a massive gold chain, cameo earrings, brooch, end bracelet. She had none of her brother's carelessness about costume, and thought it her duty to adorn her handsome person lest the young wife should crow over her middle-aged sister-in-law. " I am not going to be trampled upon," Miss Penruth said to herself.

Undoubtedly she had been handsome, and was handsome still, but her beauty was not of a melting or even of a pleasing kind. Her forehead was high and narrow, her nose aquiline, her eyes large and cold and gray— eyeß that seemed made to scan the faults and shortcomings of humanity with a clear, cruel stare. Miss Penrutb's mouth was her worst feature. Cruelty was written on the thin lips, stretching wide over teeth which were happily white and regular. Given a savage set of teeth, and this one feature would have made the lady a Gorgon. Tall and erect in figure, dignified in her walk, Miss Penruth was a person to be respected even by those who least admired her.

The honeymoon had been prolonged far beyond Mr Penruth's original intention, for in Paris the bride had fallen desperately ill of a fever —so ill that first her life and afterwards her reason had been in danger ; and when she was well, enough to be moved, her husband had taken her on to Switzerland, in the hope that mountain air would bring back youth and freshness to the faded face, and strength to the feeble limbs. He had made light of his wife's illness in his letters home, and had written with all the cheerfulness which a bridegroom is expected to exhibit. If he knew already that his marriage waß 'a mistake, he had taken care to keep that knowledge to himself.

Miss Penruth was beginning to tire of Nature and Bolitude, when a door in the ivy-covered wall at the end of the gravel walk opened, and a man came out of the stable-yard and strolled slowly towards her. Thin was Mark, the

manager at the slate quarries, the youngest of the Penruth family, a gentleman who took life easily, as it was thought, being entirely dependent on his brother both for the present and the future. To him Vyvyan's marriage must needs be a death-blow, as it reduced his chance of inheriting the Penruth estate to zero. The estate was unentailed, and entirely at his brother's disposal. Even if there were no issue to the marriage, who could doubt that the fair young wife would be preferred to the brother ? " A brother counts for nothing," said Mark, snapping his fingers contemptuously, as he played with hia dogs in the big stable-yard. Mark was a passionate lover of horses and dogs, nay, of animals of all kinds. His love of sport often got the better of his affection for the brute creation ; but he loved even the beasts he hunted, and he always felt a thrill of pain when he saw the hare winding feebly in her last giddy circle as the yelping hounds closed round her, or the lame stag making his last wild rush for the blessed refuge of streamlet or lake. He was fond x>i ferrets and ratting terriers, but he always felt sorry for the rats. He had once kept a cub fox in his bedroom at Place, and had a small menagerie there now in his rooms among the gables, much to the disgust of his sister, who asserted her liking for animals "in their proper place." ** Yes, Pris ; but your idea of their proper place is at the bottom of a pond, or nailed flat against the stable wall, isn't it, now ?" said Mark. " I hope I am not a cruel person," replied Miss Penruth, with her stately air, "but I cannot imagine myself making a friend of a weasel." " Ah !" retorted Mark, "that's because you don't know what good company a weasel can be." (To be continued. — Commenced in 'No, 1452.)]